Recent changes within the higher education system have affected the balance of academic labour. This article is based on interviews with 25 women lecturers in Education Faculties at Swedish Universities. It specifically addresses the shifting balance in terms of the increased separation between teaching and research in relation to gender, and the relationship between career advancement and gender this promotes. Distinctions concerning gender and academic labour and an enhancement of these power structures are identified, as well as how these affect possibilities of academic advancement. In conclusion, this study illustrates how women academics understand and navigate their academic career in relation to gendered attributes of academic work such as competitiveness, caretaking and responsibility are discussed.

This study concerns some of the implications of the increasing commodification of the higher education sector. It tries to highlight how higher education institutions have developed in the late 2000s through the reform path that was introduced to transform programmes and employees into marketable products. New forms of governance that change institutional contexts and concrete practices accompany this change. Based on interviews with a group of female academic lecturers and teachers, we look in particular at how the work structure is organized and practised at Swedish universities. The results illustrate a greater division of labour and a fragmentation of academic work that can be explained by recent developments. More specifically, it appears as if female academics in teaching-intensive departments do work that serves the interests of others (often men), foremost in areas and practices such as research.

This paper utilises the analytical concepts developed in the work of Basil Bernstein to reflect on the ways in which discourses such as social justice are especially vulnerable in teacher education in England. In particular, under new-managerial regimes the forms of knowledge which are emphasised and valued focus on the instrumental and performative. As a consequence, critical and vertical forms of knowledge associated with social justice in teacher education are either absent or marginalised and reframed away from an appreciation and awareness of the structural and economic causes of inequality. Moreover, the criteria needed to effectively introduce social justice as a knowledge base in teacher education are positioned antithetically to neo-liberalism-neo-conservatism, making them arguably impossible to achieve within the current system of education in England.

Recent socio-economic changes, developments in school policy, and increased migration have added new dimensions to debates about educational inequalities. They concern one of the major challenges facing Sweden today, which is to offer all its students an equal education. What we know so far is that growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood with high rates of poverty, joblessness, and single parenthood are often used to explain lower levels of schooling, but that their mechanisms and interactions are not well understood. This is the focus of the present article. In it we use meta-ethnography to explore expressions about the education experiences of youths from suburban areas with high levels of unemployment and migration and educational performances lower than the national average to try to cast further light on these problems. We suggest that the common arguments used to account for the problem of school performance are strongly correlated with proficiency in the language of instruction and socio-economic conditions, but that these factors cannot account for the full extent of the problem. What it means to live within specific multicultural urban contexts is important as is the segregation and media representation of these areas and those who live in them.

What ethnography is, what good ethnography is, and what is good and or bad about ethnography, has been debated and written extensively on both theoretically, philosophically and empirically. Attempts to define ethnography and describe it in ideal terms has been argued to be both good for ethnography, as it helps establish good standards, and bad, as it sets up barriers to experimentation and acts as a conservative force against new developments. The present paper is essentially an empirical and reflective one that has been developed from data produced by reflecting on actions and writings about ethnography and asking others do the same and to comment on these reflections. It is based on the analysis of notes and memos made in the field, as I have read and read about, supervised and carried out ethnographic research and carried out structured and unstructured conversations and deliberate and recorded interviews across a long term participation in ethnography in education research. The research has mainly been conducted in Scandinavia in particular but has also included activities with central and southern European and UK-based researchers.

The past two decades of international higher education reform are often described by researchers as having produced new managerial and neoliberal policy turns that have brought about a fundamental global shift in the way institutions of higher education are defined, run and justify their institutional existence and practices. Universities in Sweden were felt able to offer some possible resistance and based on ethnographic research at three Swedish universities this idea is explored in the present article. The article suggests however that resistance has been circumscribed through a coordinated collection of policies and that as elsewhere, the proliferation of competition based on quasi-markets and the standardisation of quality assurance through new accountability systems predominates, with significant effects on universities, their interactions and agents, and the relative social positions, influence, status and relationships of these agents.

In its most characteristic form ethnography is usually described as participant observation that involves objectively; and without any political interests in changing the course of history by either affecting the unfolding of events or influencing peoples understanding and self-understanding; participating in people’s lives, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions and then writing about that which you believe to be most interesting for another specified group. From a critical ethnographic perspective, in today’s presentation I will challenge some of these ideas….

In the presentation I will support the commitment toward participation, interaction and learning from informants in their everyday lives as important. Participant observation and involvement is important as it allows research(ers) to get up close to sites of practice and interaction in order to generate a first-hand experience based account of what is involved in and is understood to shape day to day activities, experiences and understandings. It allows learning from communities of practice on a daily basis in other words, as class cultures with unique, self-valorizing, and expressive (symbolic) properties and it allows exploration of how meaning and action can be understood in association with self-reflection within wider historical structural forces and in terms of their local concrete lived and spoken characteristics. However, whilst admitting to the value of participant observation in ethnography, I want to point out at the same time that the history of ethnography as socio-cultural participant observation is not a wholly innocent one and that ethnographic research also shows a multiplicity of forms of praxis, some of which take serious issue with ideas such as researcher impartiality and neutrality, by making a claim instead for a commitment toward engagement, empathy, critique and feedback in the interests of social and educational transformation.

23.

Beach, Dennis

University of Borås, Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT.

Based on a meta-analysis of ethnographic research about the impacts of individualisation policies in Swedish schools and higher education, this paper examines issues of inclusion and social class in the Swedish education system. After an introduction into changes in the Swedish education system and the method of meta-ethnography, we will characterise the meta-ethnographical analysis undertaken and present a discussion of its results. Tensions between claims of educational inclusion and tendencies of individualisation and privatisation are identified. Specific attention is drawn to issues of social class due to a further un-evening in the education system as a result of individualisation.

Certain common elements can be identified regarding teacher education development in advanced knowledge-based economies. One of these is an attempt, up until relatively recently, to develop a solid foundation of scientific professional knowledge for what Basil Bernstein called the teacher education Trivium: roughly speaking pedagogical sciences: approximately the psychology, sociology and philosophy of education. Another more recent development is to reverse this trend through a re-emphasis of academic subjects. This presentation is based on an analysis of this policy trajectory.

27.

Beach, Dennis

University of Borås, Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT.

Ethical appraisal boards are often argued as being modelled on utilitarian ethical conventions and as operating from a perspective of national political sovereignty that is potentially marginalising and possibly even harmful toward critical qualitative educational research, particularly ethnography. However the argument we advance is that the legislative responsibility of human rights in research shouldn’t be confused with unnecessary bureaucratic intervention, for although the work of ethical appraisal can be experienced as intrusive, threatening toward researcher autonomy and professionalism and unnecessarily bureaucratic, using qualitative research methods to elicit people’s perspectives on their environment is not uncomplicated from the perspectives of human rights, not the least those of young people in school. This tension between a notion of imposed bureaucracy and a necessary protection of rights is considered in the present chapter, which tries to bring a balanced critique of the work of ethical appraisal into view by keeping sight of the value of appraisal without denying that there are some potentially troubling tensions.

Education restructuring is often based on the claim that markets have been shown to efficiently distribute goods to individuals who need and desire them, and that services should therefore be altered so that the market can also become the ultimate arbiter of what is included in them as well. However, restructuring has also been said to have negative effects on education values such as humanism and creativity. The present article has been developed from an ethnographic case study in relation to these values. It is supported by recent ethnographic research in adult Swedish language courses for immigrants (SFI) within a particular municipal region in Sweden.

In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the volume of research production in education ethnography in Scandinavia due partly to a regionally financed network. The present article makes some comparisons between Scandinavian and other education research contexts in relation to aspects of general ethnographic design to try to analyse this production. It suggests some typical points of identity for Scandinavian educational ethnography, such as a distinct role for theories in fieldwork. But it also suggests that these characteristics are even apparent outside Scandinavia. Some blind-spots in ethnography are also suggested around quantitative aspects, but again, these are not unique. Scandinavian ethnographic research in education is broadly influenced by a range of different traditions in different parts of the region that have travelled with key people and from place to place, but it is also noted that there is seepage between ethnography and other traditions.

The history of ethnography in social science in Europe dates back to before a 1907 debate in Paris involving leading social scientists, such as Emile Durkheim and René Worms. Worms was one of the first speakers. His account of ethnography was of a descriptive, a-historical method for researching the so-called “primitive societies.” Durkheim, who spoke after Worms, disagreed. Ethnography, he suggested, can provide a basis for both analyzing and synthesizing the understandings of past cultures in relation to the present and, as all human societies have their version of civilization, ethnography can be applicable to any of them, he added. Ethnologists and historians in Germany had made this point in fact over a hundred years earlier and most ethnographers have taken this position since Durkheim’s proposition. Martyn Hammersley is amongst them. In his opening article in the inaugural number of the Journal of Ethnography and Education in 2006, he described how ethnography has been used for over 100 years in social science, as a method to investigate cultural meanings and practices influenced by both modern and postmodern epistemologies and a diverse range of theories and methodologies. This article addresses the development sketched by Hammersley and other writers in the field.

This article is based on a meta-analysis of previous research on restructuring in relation to education and health professions in Europe and more globally. It highlights common developments and signals the significant and important role of specific cycles of public to private transformation in production relations in these professions over the course of the last century and a successive movement of labour from the domestic sphere of the home to private industry as commoditized labour power, as among the most significant common global features. State involvement has been an important intermediary in these processes, by which relationships that were formerly largely untainted by commerce have become relationships involving the direct buying and selling of labour power. The process of the creation of economically productive labour power also seems to be expanding in scope in the professions, with negative consequences for service workers, low-GDP countries and lower-class fractions of recipient-consumers worldwide.

The articles in this collection conceptualise and describe notions of human agency within educational exchanges and relationships. They are based on ethnography, which is now a common approach to educational research that has also been featured in previous special issues of the present journal. According to these special issues, ethnography is important to educational research as it takes us inside everyday educational contexts and brings us close to everyday practices and the people involved in these, in a manner that helps correct the oversimplifications of more distal approaches and that provides insider perspectives on everyday action and institutional arrangements (Beach et al, 2004). In the terms of Beach (2010a), Trondman (2008) and Willis & Trondman (2000), ethnography is in this sense about developing close-up detailed descriptions of education identities and activities through situated investigations that produce knowledge about basic educational conditions and practices and the perspectives of the participants involved in them, in order to identify and develop previously unexplored dimensions of education without over steering from purely personal ideas or pet theories. It provides valuable and detailed inside knowledge of what are often otherwise seen as closed social processes by opening up the black box of institutional educational activities and practices. Participant observation field notes and interview transcripts are usually the main data sources for analysis in educational ethnography, which is also often closely linked to particular theories (Trondman, 2008) and related methodologies (Beach et al, 2004; Jeffrey & Troman, 2004). Common amongst these theories at present are forms of discourse analysis, analytical induction, constant comparative method and processes of immanent criticism deriving from the Frankfurt school of critical theory and employed in the Birmingham (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) school of critical cultural ethnography (e.g. Willis, 1977). There are thus key theoretical, practical and methodological differences within ethnography (Beach, 2010a). It is not a seamless, neutral observational practice (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983...

One thing that is very important with respect to Marxism in social research such as ethnography is the understanding adopted there of what kind of theory Marxist theory is and isn't and what consequences this has for its key concepts, their status, and what they represent philosophically as well as practically (i.e., in praxis). One important concept is the concept of social class. The Marxist concept of social class is very different to the class conceptions held in other research traditions. This isn't always fully appreciated by all critics of Marxist analysis in the social sciences.

This article is based on a meta-ethnography of research about schools, school experiences and learning following the recent (post-market) introduction of personalisation policies in Swedish schools. It pays particular attention to issues of equity. Tensions between personalisation, privatisation and equity are discussed and it is noted that personalisation policies seem to have been unable to evade the pressures of commodification or overcome the difficulties of social reproduction in education.

Personalisation came to the forefront of the English reform agenda as the ‘big idea’ (Milliband) in2004. In this country, it has been specifically devised as a means to restructure public services like health and education. Even before that date but more intensively after the English agenda, reform initiatives and some piece-meal strategies are to be found, for instance, in such diverse contexts as Italy, Sweden or Japan. Two main perspectives are simultaneously at work in recent scholarship. In the first, personalisation is assessed as global education policy, in line with the current restructuring reforms of State administration worldwide. From this perspective, personalisation is largely a matter of education policy, clearly lacking proper pedagogical theory (Hartley, 2007; Peters, 2009). In the second perspective, personalisation is assumed to be not only a matter of recent education politics concerned with school customers and their choices, but foremost a reassembly of old and new pedagogical approaches under a new reform.

Education, Democracy and Discourse comprises 10 chapters, which describe a destructive and alienating process of marketization and commoditization of educational spaces and practices that undermines the professional status and culture of teachers as public sector workers and is contributing to the destruction of possibilities for educational equality and democracy. These are important issues of interest to education workers and researchers as well as research and undergraduate students in education sciences and the sociology, politics and economics of education respectively. Although the book does not present anything significantly new to these fields, it is a well-packaged and interesting read that explodes a number of myths about education as a stable democratic entity and a common social good. Education is seen as an outcome of a resolution of different economic, social, productive, ideological and other cultural forces, constantly in flux, and an instrument of class rule mediated by discourses that are imbued with a bourgeois caste spirit; these normalize education as a basis for the supply of able workers for the capitalist economy in the interest of profit.

The organization of schools in Sweden has recently taken a significant turn toward neo-liberalism whereby educational consumerism and individualism have replaced citizenship and collective democracy as a basic ethos and driving force. A number of elements are involved. In this article we point to a risk of self segregation by means of which economically disadvantaged groups become concentrated in the same schools, within mainly the public sector. This is a particular and complex problem in multi-racial/multi-ethnic migrant intense areas according to previous research that causes these schools to experience serious difficulties when it comes to operating as schools capable of mobilization for full citizenship. We need such schools but there is no evidence that schools are developing in these directions in the neo-liberal era.

This article is based on a meta-analysis of previous research on restructuring in relation to education and health professions in Europe and more globally. It highlights common developments and signals the significant and important role of specific cycles of public to private transformation in production relations in these professions over the course of the last century and a successive movement of labour from the domestic sphere of the home to private industry as commoditised labour power, as amongst the most significant common global features. State involvement has been an important intermediary in these processes, by which relationships that were formerly largely untainted by commerce have become relationships involving the direct buying and selling of labour power. The process of the creation of economically productive labour power also seems to be expanding in scope in the professions, with negative consequences for service workers, low-GDP countries and lower-class fractions of recipient-consumers world-wide.